Beautiful Buttons

I have been working on a process to make wooden buttons with pictures of Shasta and Monroe on them. Had some success this week; thought they would be fun to use on a hand knit article made from my GSD chiengora yarn.

Fiber is Good for You

My husband and I enjoyed going to the Massachusetts Sheep and Woolcraft fair over the weekend.  Watching the Border Collies work during the sheep dog trials is my favorite part.  I want to join in the fun, all I need is a Border Collie ----- and lots of land.  I love the intensity of the dogs, their focus for the job combined with a great love of life.  It doesn't get much better than that.

I entered a few skeins in the handspun skein contest.  Several of them won ribbons and one even took best in show.  Very exciting and fun for me.  The skein that won best in show was a single ply of Racka wool.  Rackas are very interesting looking sheep with long spiraling horns.  I won the raw fleece in a drawing on Ravelry.com in the Namaste Farm group last year.  I washed the fleece and combed it with wool combs.  It was my first time using wool combs and it was very cool - they are quite wicked looking, but wow to they do a wonderful job combing out long wool.  Once the wool was combed and pulled thru a diz it was pure joy to spin.  I spun it on my Forrester double top whorl Dervish spindle.  I also plied a portion of the singles and dyed them purple and entered that skein in the hanspun contest.  This plied skein won a 2nd place ribbon in it's class.

In the singles class I also won 2nd and 3rd places along with the best in show skein. 

Learning to weave was the other fiber theme this spring as I purchased a used 4 Harness floor loom.  It took a while to figure out how to warp my loom;  learning thru books can be a slow process.  I am lucky to have a few friends that weave and can ask questions when I get stuck.

I finished my first sampler in May and am now thinking about what my first real project will be.  Table runner, place mats, baby blanket....it all sounds fun.

Garden Blues

The perennials in my garden begin to bloom in May. The first wave of color is mostly blue followed by pink in June and yellow by July. I didn't plan for that color performance; I didn't plan the garden very well at all if the truth be told. But the display of color is exciting to see every year. The new placement of some of the bi-annuals that grew from last years flowers after they went to seed is always a fun thing to see. What will the garden look like this year? I never really know until the garden decides to tell me. My garden grows with a certain amount of neglect - more some years than others. Being somewhat independent from the gardener gives the garden a chance to shine a little in it's own way, I like that.